In large assembly plants, the movement of materials and subassemblies around the plant can be a critically important task to the overall function of the plant. Each station on the assembly line must have an adequate supply of materials so that the line is not stopped in order to re-stock any individual stations. If the line must be stopped, the plant is losing efficiency, and with a loss of efficiency ultimately comes a loss of money.
However, a large volume of parts cannot be stored at each station for a number of reasons. First, there may be a lack of space within the assembly area of the plant to store any parts. Secondly, purchasing and storing a large back-stock of assembly materials may be a waste of precious capital, especially when parts may sit in storage for several weeks before actually being assembled. The demands of the modern assembly plant have created several streamlined material distribution methods. One method of note is ‘just in time’ (JIT) manufacturing. When practicing this type of distribution method, parts must move quickly from the supplier's factory to the final assembly line with little time and space wasted in between. In a large assembly plant which produces a high volume of outgoing products, moving thousands of parts around to hundreds of different workstations can be a daunting task.
In order to accomplish this, new ways of packaging parts to be assembled must be developed and corresponding methods for quickly sorting and moving these packaged parts must also be realized. Several problems exist however with current distribution systems. First, the size of assembly parts may vary widely, thus necessitating a different size and shaped container for each group of parts. For example, a day's supply of 3 mm nuts for attaching a small component may be much smaller than a day's supply of motor subassemblies. Thus, any distribution and sorting system must be able to accommodate a variety of different-sized containers. Secondly, when a plurality of different-sized containers move along a guided rail or roller system, the spacing between the containers may vary widely. Gaps between the containers may vary between several feet and several inches, and some containers may abut against one another leaving no gap whatsoever.
Modern assembly plants also pay close attention to the stress and strain that is put on the plant workforce. Most notably, injury from repetitive motions must be reduced or eliminated to ensure that a trained workforce may continue to work and not be forced to miss work due to a repetitive motion injury. Therefore, any distribution system must account for these concerns and place the smallest amount of stress on a worker as possible. Lift-assist devices have become popular, allowing a worker to lift and move a heavy object with very little bodily stress or risk of injury.
The exemplary embodiments herein allow a worker to grasp a variety of different containers, whether they are immediately next to one another or spaced widely apart. The device allows a plurality of containers to be used, from somewhat small to awkward and large, which allows the suppliers to package their parts in the most appropriate and efficient container for the application. Further, exemplary embodiments allow a worker to quickly grasp, lift, and move large containers with very little stress on their body.
The exemplary embodiments herein disclosed are not intended to be exhaustive or to unnecessarily limit the scope of the embodiments. The exemplary embodiments were chosen and described in order to explain the principles so that others skilled in the art may practice the embodiments. Having shown and described exemplary embodiments, those skilled in the art will realize that many variations and modifications may be made to affect the described invention. Many of those variations and modifications will provide the same result and fall within the spirit of the exemplary embodiments. It is the intention, therefore, to limit the embodiments only as indicated by the scope of the claims.